We sold benottos from early 80's to 87. To my knowledge, all except special orders,team bikes, etc. were made in mexico. The workmanship was fine, but the paint and decals were a step down from quality italian competitors. They were mostly columbus, but we sold a model made in ishiwata as well, called a 1000. The track frames were fairly stark, but nice workmanship again. As a note, we ran into the mexican rep at mellow johnny's a few months ago, he says they still have some older framesets in stock, mostly very large and very small. Don't know the age of remainders, assume late 80's. An interesting side note for EM fans, he says they have EM framesets as well, i guess they made frames for anyone. We sold the last of our original stock of 300 frames last year, some to list members. One was mentioned by jerry moos in his conversion note today. Nice frames, reasonable prices at the time, but they were not as pretty as gios, which we sold then as well.
jay gruen
san antonio texas